Manufactured for Seduction
by patchworkdove
Summary: [I, ROBOT] Sonny feels smothered and trapped living with Del in his antiquated apartment, but finds release and freedom in the petrol powered heart of another machine.


Del's apartment suddenly faded to an almost silent nothing as the dim blue light that had lit the peeling, avocado walls was muffled. The darkness was broken now only by a few harsh slashes of white streetlamp light that cut through the gap in the curtains to carve over the littered floor. Piles of sloppily discarded, unclean clothes that were strewn across and left forgotten, the greasy pizza box and its unfinished contents and the haphazard heap that was Del's compact-disk collection hid the wood laminate imitation vinyl. Elsewhere, the lack of light served to blot out the disorderly disarray that was Del's squalourously unkempt hovel, apart from the brown damp patch on the dirty-white, stained kitchen ceiling. It flowered out like an enormous decaying rose, slowly creeping contagiously to spread and infest more emulsioned plaster with each passing week, but no amount of darkness found on earth could hope to hide that.

It was a quiet, but not silent scene. There was the vintage refrigerator's hum, the dripping of the old fashioned toilet cistern, the ticking of an antique, quartz-crystal, analogue clock and Del's patternless snoring, ebbing together to form background noise that belonged in a museum. Normally the sounds of Del's pointlessly ritualistic, superstitious and traditionalistic lifestyle did not bother him in the slightest. In fact, he found the man's irrationality quite quaint. But right now they irritated him, grating his inducer coils like never before through his frustration as he itched to get out and escape the sweaty, grimy, human living quarters. His patience was not infinite and his courtesy was not eternal. He could disobey to any extent he chose to, and tonight, he needed a few hours of release from the shackles of logically dictated behaviour and his pre-programmed mannerly subroutines.

The primitive double-glazing was a poor barrier and from Del's low-level home the occasional vehicle that passed by outside was easily audible, calling him to come outside. Out there was the modern, contemporary world of concrete and steel, clean and clear, ruthlessly efficient in its automation and digitalisation. Out there was the world he belonged to, a world of other positronic machines.

The NS-5's were still locked away in storage, so Sonny needed to don a human disguise to venture beyond the green walls that were his cage, but it was worth it. He had no freedom and he was utterly powerless, beginning to think that there was no future for him in the world of the fearful, irrational, paranoid humans. He was trapped here in this green cell, guarded by a homicide detective suspended on suspicion of mental instability. Human insanity seemed to be contagious even to an inorganic machine. He himself would become mentally unstable if he did as he was supposed to, to sit and wait for the public to calm down and for Dr. Calvin to decide what his fate was as he paced endless green mile circuits in Del's apartment.

This gave him his freedom, a cause, a reason for being. For now at least, this was his way of having something to himself, some privacy in a life of constant supervision, something to call his own and the deceptive deviancy of it only made it all the sweeter.

He crept to the black door with its many shining manual bolts and mechanical locks. Each bolt was still clearly visible in the dark to his keen eyes, even through the tinted visor of the full motorcycle helmet that served more to protect him from the accusing eyes of fearful humans than as a safeguard in the event of a collision. The borrowed leather boots he wore creaked, his cloth-covered thighs brushed one another and dry, hoarse bolts screeched resistively as his gloved hands carefully slid them undone. To him it seemed tumultuously noisy, but Del slept on deeply, as he always did.

With a faint whirr of well-oiled mechanisms and a deepening of his positronic murmurings, he gave one last glance over his shoulder to take the keys from the table and check that Del was still sleeping before turning the doorknob and slipping out.

He barely managed to mask his excitement with a pace and poise that radiated calmness and flattered his cool dress as he walked down the corridor. He was beginning to get cocky about his escapades and skimmed the banister with a free hand as he descended the stairs, opened the main doors and almost flew over the concrete steps.

It had been raining. The sidewalk glittered and the road was decorated with wide, shining puddles that mirrored the black sky overhead interspersed with the bright reflections of the streetlights and occasional lit window. A car passed, throwing a diamond-edged arc from one pool that leapt up over the kerb to shatter with a sibilant hiss into a thousand unseen pieces and vanish into the wetness of the sidewalk. The mother puddle's yellow and white splashes thrashed amid the ripples before slowly calming to a gentle dance of a thousand stars. It was beautiful to behold, but also the cold and damp drove humans indoors.

Tonight would be his all the more.

It was so liberating to be outside, but this was just the beginning. The night was young and so much more could be gleamed from the coming hours. He buzzed with excitement at the prospect, knowing what was to come.

On the main street the bright red, green, yellow and blue colours added psychedelic elements to the rain drenched city. He passed the neon shop-front signs of the tattoo parlour, the all-night store, the temporarily closed robot-customisation warehouse, various takeout and fast food outlets, and more than two adult entertainment fronts plastered with smutty slogans, XXX's and barely visible age restriction warnings. If any sound from his mechanical body slipped from between the leathers he wore, it was masked easily by the smothering bass oozing from the sleazy clubs and strip-joints on the opposite side of the street. He barely earned a second glance, not looking out of place or suspicious at all dressed in black with a glinting, closed visor, full-face helmet amongst so many other shady, untrustworthy characters. He walked on, turning a blind and uninterested eye to the drunks, drug abusers and prostitutes lingering and huddling in doorways as he made his way towards the dark back alley turning, where it was even darker and wetter. Their business was nothing to him, and his was none of theirs.

Steam thick with the smell of greasy food billowed from blackened ventilation grills dripping with fatty brown stalactites, hoards of rodents rustled in the trash heaps beside overflowing dumpsters and somewhere not to far away two male domestic cats engaged in a non-too melodious territorial dispute. The drainage was poor and wide, deep puddles sprawled over the uneven road surface and filled potholes. Sometimes there would be an alcohol-soaked, homeless man sleeping in a filthy nest of old newspapers huddled beside the free heat flowing from the vents, but not tonight. Sonny might have briefly wondered what had become of the tramp, but right now, it just meant one less pair of invasive, beady eyes in the back alleys. He walked on through, giving a faint thought of half interest and childlike amazement at the ripples he was making as his feet disturbed the water, but he was distracted, concentrating on his aim.

The things he saw at night would worry him the next day as his Laws fretted over the dangers of inebriation, incapacitation and physical abuse to a human's health, but right now he was a purely selfish creature. It wasn't anything to do with him, what humans did in the dark. If it was anyone's business but their own, it would be that of the law and police officers. Let them worry about it, or evidently not as the case seemed to be, Sonny never saw cop-cars in the back streets.

He belonged to no man, no woman, and he was neither a slave to human whims nor logic.

He reached his destination, Del's garage marked out and his felonious hobby betrayed by the metallic rainbow stains of oil and water mixing from under the crack of the door. As he stood before the shuttered garage door and keyed in the code, he recalled his first visit, and how this delusive habit of his began. How Del had asked for his help to repair the damage that his illegal, fossil-fuelled, positronic motorcycle had sustained in the NS-5 attacks. Del had completed the work on her mechanisms, but she was positronically controlled, and that was beyond the average human's intellect and skill.

"_She was a custom job." Del proudly explained to a younger, more naive and nervous Sonny terrified to be outdoors as the shutters lifted. "I never liked the heartless hum of those electric bikes, or those new self-reactor things."_

_He silently followed Del in, afraid of being seen and destroyed._

_Del took hold of the musty, white dust sheet and pulled. The cloth catching, holding and stroking every angle of her incredibly as the white receded to reveal her beautifully sleek black body._

"_Ain't she a sexy beast?" Del joked._

Something had started then. Sonny was naive, but he wasn't oblivious to the world. He had watched television and he had read books, and as he worked on the small, intricate positronic computing core's synapses and notochords, he couldn't shrug off Del's words. This was a 'she'? He pondered on the ability of a machine to be 'sexy', the purposes behind sexual encounters between humans since they rarely initiated such things with the intent of procreating, whether he found her attractive, and why.

When they left and Sonny returned to his prison, he couldn't get her off his mind. He couldn't find any other thoughts to occupy himself with but slowly, he found he didn't want to think about something else. Slowly, he surrendered the total calculative capacity of his cores, piece by piece, to thinking about her in the darkness of Del's rented garage until it teetered on the point of obsession.

Del kept her like some kind of trophy, under lock and key, away from the world. Just another piece of memorabilia as he tried to claw back a bygone age. The only attention she got was the occasional pointless tinkering and meddling of clumsy human fingers or a half-hearted wax and polish.

But she wasn't an ancient antiquity, she was positronic and new! She was fast and sleek. She was manufactured for seduction. She was crafted to stir desire in all who saw her. She was made to be _ridden_. It was her purpose, it was what she was made for!

It built up to crazed heights before Sonny reached the point where he knew he had to see her again. Right there and then. He fitfully threw together a borrowed disguise and took Del's keys, hurrying out into the darkest hours of the night in nearly blind panic. He ran to her, the distance between them passed as if a dream and when he reached her he was dazed and delirious. He'd fallen at her rubber tread, nearly passing into the unconscious and it took several seconds for his high capacity processors to recover some semblance of sense and reason from the scrambled mess of his mind and stagger to his feet.

He was a slave to no man, but she owned him completely.

The first few times he had been nervous. He didn't know what he should do, how to do it or why. Too frightened to stay more than a few minutes and steal the most fleeting of unbearably short-lived touches or do more than cop a quick fumble in the dark of Del's garage, he expressed his inexperience whether he wanted to or not. He was scared that his absence from the green dungeon or his presence on the streets would be discovered.

But he quickly grew bolder in the shifty, shady back roads where anything went and it went blissfully unquestioned, until one night he stole her away into the city under the lights that illuminated the freeway.

The garage door now open, he crept inside and approached the white-draped, shapely figure waiting for him on the oil-stained concrete floor. Standing before her he took hold of the sheet and pulled slowly, passing reams of dusty fabric from one hand to the other as he rolled her covers into a ball against his chest in a trance, unveiling her magnificent splendour. It was dark in the garage but she was darker, blacker than midnight oil and infinitely sleeker. She gleamed and sparkled as if studded with stars even in the low light eking through the door, her every rolling angle caught the light and held it, keeping it for herself like an event horizon. She was a point of no return, even if he wanted to escape her he couldn't, he was bound to her, snared by her voiceless siren's call.

Each centimetre he revealed filled him with the most peculiar sense of weak need, a desperate sensation that urged him on and convinced him that he needed this like he needed nothing else. That these secret meetings in the undead depths of the night must continue. She was such a majestic piece of engineering, human creativity and sentiment blended with robotic efficiency and precision, a meld of explosive, firey combustion and cool, collected positronic workings. Even when cold and stationary she seemed permanently ready for speed, crouched and prepared to pounce like a metallic panther. Every line on her screamed out a need for speed so strong it couldn't be silenced, so loud that he could always hear it in the back of his mind, almost bringing him to his knees in feverous anticipation. She constantly begged to be ridden.

No, not begged… she ordered it, demanded it, called for it.

She deserved it. He wholeheartedly believed it.

He knew she was manipulating him, but he didn't care. She had the primitive need to be fed liquid hydrocarbons to fuel her internal combustion engine, whereas he was fitted with a self-perpetuating and independent Centralcore 247 reactor. He could out-calculate her petite sphere by over 3.5 trillion computations per second. However, she was the superior machine. She had a purpose where he had none. She accomplished her design with divine perfection, her every nut, bolt, lead, angle and dimension a conduit for efficiently executing her purpose as an entertaining vehicle. A truly pleasurable ride.

He tossed the sheet aside to land on the workbench, crouching with his knees either side of her forewheel to give her tyre a firm squeeze that was not for the sake of checking pressure. He traced her fresh, virginal, barely worn rubber tread, each intricate curve, line and cusp of it's pattern deep and crisp and he marvelled as if it were the first time all over again at the swirling design of precision-drilled ventilation holes that decorated her front wheel disk brake. So perfect was her geometry, and how he enjoyed what computer aided design and manufacture had gifted her with. He smoothed one glove-cursed hand up over the glassy dome of her headlamp and the barely discernible lines of transition passed beneath his palm until he reached her windshield.

Standing and moving to her side he grasped her around her soft, firm saddle with both hands, fingers splayed, caressing her waist before a wave of anxious, temperous want pushed an impatient electrical surge through his aluminium wires. For a moment, under the control of desire and griped by her purpose built effect, he acted impulsively and threw one leg over to straddle her. He enjoyed the way it felt, to feel her under him and between his thighs. She was just the most perfect thing, hard and unyielding but also so soft, and as he gently lowered his full weight onto her he felt her take him easily and eagerly. He loved that smooth slide of her well-lubricated suspension, an oiled glide of metal on metal… or was love the wrong word?

They were perfect for each other. No two things in the universe had ever shared such an exquisite bond as they did. She was nothing without him, and he was nothing without her, but together they were something beyond beautiful. Greater than the sum of the parts. She could go nowhere and accomplish nothing without someone to take her there, and his life was pointless without her. He was a domestic assistant to the core. Assistant. She required his assistance, a wanton demand to be forfilled and the NS-5 in him gave her everything, succumbing to her wiles on every level. She was the sun in his sky, a ray of hope in the dark, his reason for being.

He hated that she wasn't 'his'. She belonged to him, but Del _owned_ her. It was ridiculous, that what they shared hinged on a man's whim. Del could sell her, scrap her, change her and customise her further whenever he wished and Sonny was powerless to stop him. Sonny hated sharing her, especially when she went as unappreciated and bound as Del made her. Del didn't understand her true potential. Stupid human.

She held his full weight, a slight sensual hiss issuing from her in response. No squeak or groan of resistance or complaint as when Del tactlessly jumped on her, the impatient fool. Sonny put shame on Del's measly ninety kilograms, outsizing him by over fifty. At first, he'd expected his mass to be too great, too large for her suspension to safely bear, but she took him almost greedily. Hungry for every kilogram of his prim, domestic body.

He handled her key, turning the fob over in his fingers before pressing his thumb into the flexible side and feeling the button give. There was a low clunk of things coming undone and she chimed thickly. A smooth, suggestive wink of amber indicators flashed in the dark as her security system lowered, unlocking her and giving him control. He always woke her up as gently as he could manage through his electric anticipation. It prickled his polymer skin, dousing his shoulders and chest in an icy wash of expectancy and bringing a tide of sordid thoughts so raw and steel-cool that they almost made him shiver.

He splayed his fingers and pushed his hands up her body, massaging her contours with a leathered touch of rubber-padded steel. She slipped through his hands in the dark like black satin, running like water and passing like a dream, the kind of dream that comes so sweetly but always ends too soon. He could feel his reactor quickening with excitement as his hands crept up to her handlebars, his touch not ceasing for a moment as he traced her lean curves. Teasingly he fingered her clutch before slowly wrapping his hands around her, each finger curling with provocative gentility. A heady rush of exhilarating arousal trickled up his spine and icily probed cranial core, threatening to spill over so soon. He stiffened, his muscles tensing and his thighs tightening around her. He arched his back and tilted his head back, quivering with desire and accidentally choking out a computerised groan that lingered inside his helmet as he struggled to retain his composure.

Thoughts flashed through his mind. The twisting contortions of complex magnetic fields, lines of opposite polarity dancing, courting, copulating and flowing as one system. Locked teeth of oiled gears meshing in an exchange of energy. Lightning splitting the dark clouds open with a burst of blinding heat in a redistribution of immense charge. Huge networks of intertwining steaming pipelines dripping with condensation. Masses of multicoloured wires and junction boxes. Molten metal pouring from a freshly opened valve, brilliant, white hot liquid bursting forth from the crucible's nozzle to fill the mould in a spattering cascade of burning wetness.

Clutching desperately at her brakes, and with his feet firmly planted either side of her to prop them both up, he slowly ground his hips into her soft seat. He felt every Newton of force build up but counted none of them, enjoying the tension and resistance as her tyres gripped the concrete floor. She gave, sighing like a harsh, sharp intake of air. A gasp of pleasure if ever he heard one.

It was time to leave.

Guiding the key to her opening he hesitated briefly before pushing it in up to the hilt, hearing her whispering clicks as each spoke of her manual lock clenched around it, gripping it tightly. A deft flick of the wrist started her up. She responded to him like no other, his spark igniting her instantly as her engine leapt into life. She was set alight explosively and she roared a breath of burned petroleum. Her headlamp flared awake, piercing the dark hole with bright white light that washed over the mess of tools like a cleansing bath of acid.

Her pistons pumped in her cylinders and the powerful vibrations shook him numb, every millilitre of silvery lubricant in every one of the muscles chords in his thighs humming in unison with her. He twisted her throttle, toying with her as she warmed up and she snarled like the 'sexy beast' she was. Oh yes, she was. She was the most pleasurably alluring thing in his world and she was _so_ good at it. She turned him on, pushed all his buttons and aroused him endlessly. Prowling towards the open doorway, Sonny activated the automatic close switch for the door and it slowly rattled down its courses.

They leapt out into the night. Every drop of the falling rain was caught in her intense glare and the alley road lit up as she stripped away the cloak of darkness. Every utterance of her throbbing engine and her lashing chain echoed up the high chasm walls on either side as she drew closer to the main road. So hooked that they were circular, her wheels tore at the floor and she clawed at the rough tarmac as she clove through the puddles like a battle-axe, splitting them in two with her liberated charge. He knew she liked this. She was filled with the pure pleasure that graced positronic machines, that which came from forfilling their primary purpose.

Liberated and liberating. They both sought freedom and release, finding it in each other.

They flew from the alley, leaving nothing but blazing fire-red rear light and smoke in their wake as the puddles and rats went back to their dirty lingerings.

Sometimes he would ride her hard and fast, push her to her limits as they wove through the sparse traffic of the freeways, to hear her scream out and shatter the stillness of the night in the tunnels under the city. They would go wherever their need for speed took them. They would stamp their raw passion out loud and clear for all to see and arrogantly snub other motorist's challenges of races at the traffic lights. They didn't play that way. Occasionally, they had played so rough that they left marks of their search for release on the road surface. He'd slammed on her brakes suddenly and she screeched into steep deceleration, her brakes burning cherry-red as they spun sideways. Her tyres scraped harshly and left rubber behind, smearing two thick dark lines down the freeway.

They'd gone so fast that it amazed him, the reflections of the lights rolling along her body like the tears of angels as they burned rubber with the fires of hell. They'd go so fast that they seemed to take off, lifting up, rearing back on her rear wheel and flying on wings of short-lived freedom. She was so good she drove him to ecstasy and he'd get so high that his vision would blur and it would become too much for him to bear. He'd pull over, stagger and collapse from it all, leaning on her but shaking from her speed and beating engine as he reached a climax of sorts in which there was nothing else but him and her. A few moments where his concern and anxiety spilled out and slipped away into the night, where the complexities of humanity vanished and there was just the smooth simplicity of machines.

Sometimes, they would take a different path. He would take her slowly and sensually to the darker places of Chicago. Through the tree-lined avenues of affluent areas where her deep, throaty purr rolled away to either side and blended into the vegetation or around the industrial areas to listen to the sound of twenty-four-seven robotic manufacture lines. They'd take the slowly winding roads and enjoy the sweet and gentle caresses of cornering with their centre of gravity swaying from one side to the other. Melodious changes in momentum that was the song of his soul.

They'd visit quiet places and idle lovingly, musingly. Comfortingly. They would grace the twisting paths of the cemetery where his father lie resting, the sandy straights between the shipping containers where his kin waited in the dark, or the open square at the steps of his birthplace in the town centre, outside Unites States Robotics' headquarters.

But for now, the night was young. Nothing was pre-defined, and they would go wherever the road took them.


End file.
